Weather, Amman

M

You are here

The centre left and globalisation

Dec 31,2018 - Last updated at Dec 31,2018

By Kemal Dervis and Caroline Conroy

WASHINGTON, DC — Popular uprisings across France are threatening to shatter the hope that so many had placed in French President Emmanuel Macron after his election in May 2017. With his party, La République En Marche! having secured an absolute parliamentary majority, Macron promised to pursue difficult reforms not just in France, but also within the European Union. But now he is facing the biggest crisis of his presidency.

Revitalisation of the EU has long depended on a strong French leader capable of overhauling the country’s economy. Before the proposed fuel tax that brought the yellow vests into the streets last month, Macron had managed to overcome opposition to a series of labour-market reforms. Though politically difficult, the reforms were necessary to bring the budget deficit below 3 per cent of gross domestic product, in accordance with EU rules, and modernise France’s generous social-security system in the face of disruptive new technologies.

As I (Dervis) argued in May, the traditional centre-right and centre-left are too deeply embedded in European political life to be erased by an upstart political movement like Macron’s. So, for Macron to retain his popularity, he must cooperate with or somehow subsume either the centre-right or the centre-left.

In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, two-thirds of France’s centre-left electorate voted for Macron. Still, he had two avenues open to him when he took office. The first was to adopt the centre-right’s agenda and pursue labour-market, tax and investment policies that would “adapt” France to “capitalist” globalisation. Somewhat surprisingly, this is the route he initially chose, quickly becoming the darling of the business-oriented international press.

The other avenue would have required Macron to build on a preexisting but vague conception of left-wing internationalism. In practice, that would mean pursuing policies to help the middle class, while updating an obsolete centre-left programme to account for the effects of disruptive technologies and business models. As the economist Dani Rodrik has long argued, more globalisation requires a larger state, in order to compensate those displaced by free trade, capital-account liberalisation and so forth. Without compensation, there is no guarantee that globalisation will maintain broad public acceptance.

This is not to say France can do without centre-right reforms. The budget absolutely does matter, and reducing deficits will always require unpopular spending cuts and tax increases. Likewise, the French labour market tends to benefit insiders, thus making it harder for everyone else to find a job. And the state-owned rail system was in desperate need of an overhaul. In his first year-and-a-half in office, Macron started to tackle these problems, and managed to deliver a budget in line with EU deficit rules.

The problem is that in pursuing these reforms, Macron abandoned his core centre-left constituency. Step by step, his reforms seemed consistently to benefit the rich. And so, when it was announced that his government would increase the tax on diesel fuel, middle- and working-class commuters took to the streets. With polls showing that around 70 per cent of the French support the yellow vest protesters, Macron was forced to retreat.

Was there a full-fledged centre-left alternative that Macron could have pursued instead? The short answer is no. Reformers concerned primarily with income and wealth inequality, environmental sustainability and democracy are still trying to figure out what a left-wing approach to globalisation should look like. Unlike neoliberalism, which is clear in its policy prescriptions, a centre-left approach must offer an entirely new social contract to address the effects of technological disruption, deepening globalisation and climate change.

More to the point, the left must understand that it cannot win this battle by focusing on domestic policymaking alone. Technological innovations and the global networks that facilitate their diffusion cannot be reversed or unraveled; at best, they can be slowed down. But those who resist change will end up less competitive in the economy of the future. The only real choice, then, is to move ahead, but also with social-welfare reforms to protect every citizen and to compensate the losers. Sufficient resources must also be available to facilitate learning and new careers.

Needless to say, a new centre-left social contract will require substantial public resources, wisely deployed, often by local governments. At the same time, governments will have to cooperate to prevent international blackmail in the form of tax and regulatory arbitrage. Unmanaged globalisation encourages capital and high-income earners to flock to low-tax jurisdictions, depriving governments of the revenues needed to maintain social-security systems. Fortunately, the G-20 has begun to recognise this as a problem. But much more work needs to be done to adapt tax, healthcare and education systems to a global economy in which tech giants are developing new forms of monopoly power.

These efforts will require a lot of new thinking. For their part, centre-left leaders must start exploring ideas for radical and innovative new governance platforms at both the national and international levels. They could do worse than to read the historian Yuval Noah Hariri’s new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, which offers a blueprint for addressing collective challenges like climate change and nuclear proliferation.

The world is undergoing a technological revolution that has the potential to benefit us all. But much will depend on whether there is leadership to manage the coming disruptions. The alternative is to risk updated versions of the twentieth century’s political catastrophes and world wars. Either way, Macron is a bellweather, because what happens in France will not stay in France.

Kemal Dervis, former minister of economic affairs of Turkey and former administrator for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Caroline Conroy is a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018.www.project-syndicate.org

The Jordan Times

The Jordan Times is an independent English-language daily published by the Jordan Press Foundationsince October 26, 1975. The Jordan Press Foundation is a shareholding company listed on the Amman Stock Exchange.